India.com signs multi year deal with Outbrain

Online content discovery platform Outbrain has signed a multi-year partnership with India.com, reports Indiantelevision.com. The deal will also cover India.com’s other online properties such as eenews.com, dnaindia.com, Bollywoodlife.com, Cricketcountry.com, OnCars.in,Prepsure.com, BGR.in, Careerfundas.com, TheHealthSite.com, Travel.india.com and Video.india.com.

Outbrain’s platform will help India.com to manage its content recommendations, increase audience engagement, and provide key insights and analytics about their core digital users. The report also said that the company had signed up for Outbrain’s new product called Native In-Feed. The new product allows publishers to use the Outbrain platform to serve native (in-stream) advertising. Outbrain partners can sell their own campaigns and use Outbrain’s UI and tools to deliver these campaigns to their audiences.

Outbrain’s other two solutions, Amplify and Engage, claims to serve about 190 billion recommendations every month and reach 561 million consumers every month (as of September 2014, according to comScore data). Engage is a content management software for media organisations, while through Amplify, Outbrain promotes content on leading publications like CNN.com, Slate, ESPN, The Daily Telegraph, New York Post, and Time Inc among many others, besides the Indian publications. It currently claims to have tie ups with publishers and marketers in 55 countries.

Outbrain’s other deals in India

In June, Outbrain renewed its its partnership with Network18, and brought on board a number of other Indian publications including Indian Express, ABP Live, Financial Express, MTV India (Viacom), ScoopWhoop, Sanjeev Kapoor, StoryPick, MissMalini, and fossBytes.

In March, Outbrain had signed a multi-year strategic partnership with Times Internet to offer personalized content recommendations to readers on the latter’s online properties including The Times of India, The Economic Times and Indiatimes.

Competition

– Outbrain’s competitor Taboola had also launched operations in Asia Pacific in December 2013 and had inked agreements with Indian publishers and content providers like Hindustantimes.com, Bollywoodshaadis.com and India.com properties like ZeeNews, CricketCountry, BollywoodLife, The Health Site, BGR India, and others.

– In February this year, former IBNLive CEO Rajan Srinivasan had launched a content marketplace for brands called Scatter. The marketplace curated content from Indian and international publishers, and made it available for brands to use on social media and other digital platforms (for a fee). Scatter also intended to expand its content offering beyond text to include video, and launch the platform globally by March. It claims to have tie ups with over 80 Indian and international publishers, including India Today, Indian Express, Outlook (Magazine), IBT Media, Business Today, Rolling Stone, Man’s World, Gizbot, OneIndia and Nativeplanet among others.

– In April, Godot Media co-founders Sophia Solanki and Vishal Dutta launched a content discovery and social media scheduling platform called DrumUp. It allows small businesses, startups and individual professionals to discover relevant content for their audience and schedule the posts for Twitter and Facebook.